Tips and Tricks

Instant kill using the ladder

Only one encounter can occupy a single tile. If your ladder is
surrounded by three walls (with
obviously one opening to reach it), you can climb the ladder and wait for an
encounter to go right under
it. If you go down the ladder at that time, the encounter will be pushed
out of the way, but if there is
already another encounter on that tile next to the ladder, the encounter
will be crushed instead.
Use the camera to know exactly when an encounter is trapped under the
ladder.

It's safer to place the chest on socket than a charged hand on chest

There are only three things that can come in contact with electricity: Your
leader's hand, a droid chest
or a battery. Any other item will explode. If you need to recharge the
chest of your droid, it is much
safer to take the chest in your hand and make it touch the electric socket
because if you accidentally
touch anything else with a charged hand (arm, leg, head, inventory item,
etc.), you will lose it.

However, note that a droid without a chest is completely vulnerable to hits. When you get financially comfortable, purchase a battery. Batteries don't destroy other objects and can only recharge chests.

Sell clipboards

Sell clipboards! In fact, when you first land on Butre, a good trick is to go and pick up the message from Ratt and place it in your inventory. Return to the Swan, land again, and there will be another message
from Ratt. Pick this up as well and repeat this 88 times by putting the messages in your inventory, hands and cursor. Enter a base and find a shop where you
can sell all the messages and get 18,400 credits.

Keep some Zlots

Zlots are weapons that are sometimes found behind a wall panel. At the
beginning, they are pretty useful
because you lack the money to buy real weapons and ammunitions. After a while, you will see them as being
useless, but do keep a couple of them around in your inventory because they are very useful to blow up mines when there are no electric sockets around.

Use the name book

You know these silly books that describe people only by their names? Well, it's time to use it for
Captive. The name of a droid defines its dexterity, vitality and wisdom. Pick names until you have descent initial skills (maximum initial value is 15 for each skill). You can use the MaxSkills tool to help you out.

Heavy money

A money bag can be quite heavy, and the heavier you are, the faster the
electricity will drop. When you
enter the base, the first thing you can do is drop all your money bags,
except perhaps for one. You will
need to get back to that specific location once the base has been destroyed
anyway.

You can trust the shopkeeper

When you have found your first shop, leave your money bag in the hand of the
shopkeeper. The bag travels
from one shop to the next, so there's no need to carry it all the time with
you and get that extra weight.
Just don't forget to get it back before leaving the base!

Get more shots from canistors

Flambos are incredibly rare ammunitions. If you happen to find some
canistors, there's a way to get more shots from them. A flambos canistor only offer 10 shots, but if you drop it in fire, it will
increase its capacity to 60 shots!

The same can be done for acid canistors that go from 10 shots to 50 shots when dropped in water.

Batteries can be partially recharged with fire

Dropping a battery in fire will set its power level to 23%, regardless of its current power level.

Kill'em all!

Once you have what it takes to leave the base, don't leave until all the
encounters are killed.
Encounters increase the experience points which allows you to increase your
skills which make future
encounters easier to kill.

Carrying more than a single probe

You can leave the base with more than one probe. The advantage of this comes when you can't find the probe of a future planet, for which you always have other probe(s) in backup. If you drop a second probe in space right after the first one has indicated a planet, it will go to the next planet which allows you to skip a level. However, note that all levels must be completed in order to access the space station and complete the mission, making level skipping useless.

Sleeping - One of the best weapon

Encounters may not see through walls, but they have a radar that tells them
where you are. They are
stupid enough to shoot in your direction no matter what is between you and
them. If there is an encounter
in the way, it will be shot by the other encounter. If the encounter has
ammunition that bounces back,
it will end up killing itself. The point is, if you hear a 'Clank!' sound,
it means an encounter has been
hit by something. Hit the sleep button which will hold your electricity
level (if all devices are offline) and make time go faster.
When you hear the money bag drop, wake up and laugh like a mad droid.